Hello, and welcome to snows return a tabletop role playing podcast. My guest today has created a gaming system to help you see the wood from the trees in the veritable jungle or tabletop role playing games out on the market today. They didn't just try. They forged a game, a setting and a legacy. Whether you're Appleseed Cowboy Bebop or outlaw Star naukowe mythos will lock down your free time. So stack the deck in the favour of your group, grab your dice, and set your sights on Amiga tear adventures, as it's my pleasure to welcome Chance Holzwart of Nor Cal mythos. Chance, welcome to the show.
Chance-NCM:Hey, thank you for having me. I think that's my favourite introduction I've ever had. I was awesome.
Snyders Return:Thank you. Well, moving away from from what I've read off a piece of paper and into what you've done. Before we touch on NorCal mythos. And all the good stuff you're doing, including the Kickstarter, we'll get to, would you mind telling us how you got into tabletop role playing games, please?
Chance-NCM:Oh, yeah, no, I got started. I think I was probably 12 or 13 years old. Mike Dumas, who is another one of the guys in NorCal mitos. He got me started. He's, me and Mike have been friends since middle school. So we've been probably 25 years now. We've been hanging out and gaming and all kinds of stuff. And the other big part in NorCal mojitos. His team is Nick Heliopolis. And actually met Nick through my wife. My wife's actually known Nick longer than me, but he also got involved with gaming with us probably when I was around, I'll say 20 years old or so. So Nick's been gaming with us for 18 years ish. And I mean, Miko know, for 25. And we've just had a whole lot of fun doing this. And me and Mike started building our first campaign setting, I think, at least 20 years ago. And, you know, we've been going through we built a few systems over the years and eventually hit the point where we realised Well, I, there's stuff, you know, there's a lot of good stuff, we played tonnes of different games, and we enjoyed every tabletop role playing game I've ever played. But you know, some do want some things. Well, some do other things well, but we never had a game that was actually what we wanted. And so I was like, well, let's just build it. So we went ahead, and we built our own game system. And we built carbine jungle, which was our first game system. And it has what we call the Triforce engine, which is our game engine with which has very customizable rule sets. And from there we built we built a mission decks, which is kind of like a little bit of expansion on that and right now we just released lockdown or releasing lockdown on Kickstarter. And it is our I get, it's our second complete system, although it's part of the carbine jungle universe, but it is a game all unto itself. You can play it without carbine jungle or with carbine jungle, it's your choice. It works either way. And it's it's kind of fun because this is the first game system that we've really put together. Since we did our first big one where we since we did our first complete one, so we're able to go through and clean up some of the stuff as it you know, we could have done this better and all that stuff that all those little things that we could have tweaked to do better. In carbine jungle, we're now doing a lockdown, which is a whole lot of fun. So basically, we're three gaming nerds have been doing this for decades. I love doing this stuff. And now we're building a whole nother world a whole nother world, another world and inside of our universe, which is enriching enriching our universe and just having a ball.
Snyders Return:Yeah, absolutely. And sort of so from your your teens as it were through to the creation, the founding of NorCal mythos, may ask where the name came from out of interest?
Chance-NCM:Well, we're from Northern California. All of us grew up in Monterey County, which is kind of what we say Northern California, it's more central California is right in the middle. But you know, if you're where I'm from, that's more California kind of gets broken in half. We're in the top half if you break it in half and our initials are in cm for Nick, Mike and chance and for Nor Cal meet those that worked out really well. So we ended up kind of using that as a little bit of an acronym, a little bit of fun. And, you know, it's where we're from. And we also love mythology and all that type of all that type of stuff in history and all that. So, for us, it really fit. It was fun. So we went with it.
Snyders Return:Yeah, absolutely. And so you created this try forge engine and carbine jungle, you're wearing a wonderful t shirt that the listeners can't see. But it's very stylized. I'd love it available on Amazon. I Feel free to contribute and support the creators. By finding a T shirt there. I might be able to put a link in the description below. I'm not sure how Amazon feels about that. But yeah,
Chance-NCM:I'll get you a link that's easy.
Snyders Return:So, you found this and you create a carbine jungle for someone who has played other d 20. systems or powered by the apocalypse system. What is it? What is the Triforce engine? And and how does that work with carbine jungle slash lockdown your your new release on Kickstarter?
Chance-NCM:Yeah, cuz lockdown uses the same rule set and the the characters are all designed to go together. But really, the Triforce engine is many a name for our game engine. So that's what we went with. And really, because there's three tight, there's basically three main rule sets. And all of our rule sets for for carbine jungle for lockdown for over over games, we try to make them as customizable as possible. So we start off we have what we consider the stock rules. And the stock rules is a very rich set of rules that gives you awesome gameplay. It is d 20. based. So if you play Dungeons and Dragons, or Pathfinder, or any of the games, where you roll a D 20. To see if you hit Miss or succeed or fail, it'll feel pretty familiar. And then it's just kind of going through and enriching that system making as strong as possible. And how do we deviate from most systems will we have an awesome injury system that we're depending on once you take whether you get criticals, or deal criticals, and stuff like that, you can take injuries that will affect your characters for multiple sessions. So it gives a little bit stronger reveal. We have rules for morale, for characters that are going through difficulties, we created a determination system for skills, where basically skills have a little bit more urgency, it's not just roll and you have a check, we basically try to build skill conflicts, we want skills to feel as rich in our games as the combat does. And we really tried to build a very rich combat system, those a lot of fun. So our stock rule set has a lot of stuff in it, that just really gives it a good feel. And we also built it though, kind of modular, so it's like, well, I don't want to deal with morale, it's okay to skip it. You know, I don't want to I just I don't want skills to be a big part, I just rather roll a check like DND and move on. Okay, do that. You know, we build it real modular rivers, any part that you think your game would be smoother without you just ignore that part. We also built the strategic rule set. And the strategic rule set has a lot of aspects that get more into the complicated aspects of the game, it's if you really want to go through and kind of stack bonuses and really lay out a battlefield like, okay, you know, let's see if we can build advantages by gaining better position and things along those lines. The strategic rule says all design about that if you want to have a game that really rewards that type of thinking, and requires that type of complexity, then you can start mixing in some of the strategic ruleset. And for people that like games that are really streamlined, we built what's called the flippin fight rule set. And the flippin fight rule says design, use a deck of cards, you'd also use the D 12. We're actually going to be posting cards that you could buy on Drive Thru RPG where you could buy a deck of flip and fight cards to use, but you don't need the cards that are optional. We weren't, we're not magic the gathering, we're not trying to make you buy, like as many things as possible, you could use a D 12, or a deck of 52 playing cards works fine. And the whole purpose of it is that with the flippin fight system, all bonuses get streamlined down for up to plus two to minus two, you flip a card and it tells you if you succeed or fail. So if you want to have a really rich, robust rule set that has a lot of complexity and strategy, you can if you want to have something where it's streamlined down to a plus two to minus two. So it's just focusing on role playing, you can and you can run all three game systems in the same game. So if you have and this does put a lot of strain on the DM, mind you like for the Game Master is going to have a bit of work if they're keeping straight, who's using what rule sets. But usually what ends up happening is you kind of have a rule set that the table likes table will probably use some combination of stock or strategic rules and journal that they like and you have a new guy that wants to come in and play. Well, getting him used to a full rule set of games can be really tough when they're starting off. So you just make them a quick flip and fight character. And he's able to go through playing the same game with everyone else finding the same monsters doing all the same everything. And then just use a flip and fight. And you can read the whole campaign through flip and fight if you like. Or if the character gets to a point where like, No, no, I want to try out the more complex rule sets, they can graduate up and start doing that. Basically, you run the game however you want. We're going to give you a world and we're going to try and give you all the tools to make it fun and make it interesting. And then you play however you want to play it. You know once once you got a book, it's not our game anymore. It's yours. So you run the game however you want. We just want you to have fun with it. And we're gonna try and make sure you have everything you need. For that to happen that's, that's really our idea for our Triforce engine. Huh?
Snyders Return:Well speaking or you mentioned that about once they bought the book it becomes their game our game. Where can we find naukowe mythos and your products and your games and your Kickstarter so we can push people that way while they listen to this interview?
Chance-NCM:Well, carbine jungle has been out for a couple of years now, drive thru rpg.com is one of the best places to pick it up. It's also on Amazon, although I think on Amazon, you can only get paperbacks and I don't think any digital copy drive thru RPG you can get digital copies PDFs, or you can just get the you could buy hardbacks there too. So really drive thru RPG is a better place to buy it. If you want to find it on Amazon though you can. on Amazon, we do also have a black and white copy black or white or pink or, or colour depending on which one you prefer. So the black of white obviously is less expensive, because it's a whole lot cheaper to print. If you just want to get a copy of the book and check it out, that's not a bad way to go. So but that's where you can find carbine jungle lockdown, which is our game that we are currently building, we actually have 180 page free version that you can download from the Kickstarter right now, but it's on Kickstarter. And locked down is an anime inspired tabletop role playing game, which basically means we've watched a lot of anime we love a lot of the characters and the worlds and the fields that you get from those games. And we try to build a game where it has all of the stuff in our game engines that with how we like to play. And you can build all these different characters that you love and go through and explore their worlds or the world that we're giving you on lockdown or however you want to do it. Like I said it's your game. But that's on Kickstarter right now you can back it. If you want to see what it's like you look for lockdown ttrpg there is no see and lockdown is L Okay, d o w n or search for nor count meet those on Kickstarter, you I'm sure you'll find it. And you could download the 180 page version of the game it's got tonnes of stuff in there really gives you a good idea for how the game feels. And you know, you don't really have to take my word for it looks good, if you like the idea of it because it's I really think we put together something that you're really going to enjoy.
Snyders Return:And what about social media or a website?
Chance-NCM:We do have our website NorCal mitos.com. And also on social media Twitter's probably the best place is where we're most active. And it's just add NorCal me those in or ca l myth o s. And if nothing else go there, you'll find a whole lot of tabletop shenanigans. And we try to we're pretty light hearted about everything we do. But we're nerds that love this stuff. So that's basically we're sitting there laughing about whatever we could laugh about all the time. We love gaming. We love the gaming community. So we're just kind of on there having a bit of fun. So if you can't find on Kickstarter, go to Twitter, look at NorCal mitos. I guarantee you'll find lots of stuff that I'm posting about this. I am not shutting up about it's almost the point. Probably annoying several people that are following me but I'm doing a Kickstarter, so they're going to hopefully put up with it. But uh, yeah, we're, we're finable we're out there and we're having fun.
Snyders Return:Well, I will make sure the links are in the description below. So please follow those links go and support the Kickstarter, which we will talk about now actually, and before we get into the Kickstarter and the 180 pages and your plans for that. What inspired Where Where were your anime inspirations from
Chance-NCM:a man i when i you know, the first thing that I first anime ever watched was Voltron. I didn't know what I didn't know it wasn't anime. And part of that's because the American version I got apparently took two or three enemies and splice them together in a very weird fashion that made absolutely no sense. And when I found that out like 10 years ago, a whole lot of my childhood started to come together Ronin warriors I think was the first landed a lot of people don't even know this show, but it was the first anime that for me when grown up that had that anime feel to it. It was like you're watching and you realise this is not like the normal cartoons I watched and that I was probably like nine or something like that when I watched this but it was just at a very different feel to it. It was darker is more gritty. It was a lot more serious tone and the story was continuing throughout the whole thing. And that was kind of where I got my start. And after that, you know Dragonball Z was huge when I was a kid loved it and then you had Ghost in the Shell and Ninja Scroll and Cowboy Bebop and death node and tack on Titan I'd actually I've only recently started watching Attack on Titan, which is kind of fun about three seasons in and it's just, you have all of these different things and that whatever enemy you're watching, the best part about it is whatever the world is, they go to the hilt, you know they don't pull punches. They don't flinch from anything, whatever their world is, they go all the way there. And they have this grittiness to it. But they also have this hope about the about the storyline, that they're going well, except for Attack on Titan, they don't really have most of them. Most of them still have this sense of uplifting as they're going through these rough times these horrors, you know. And with lockdown, that's really what we wanted to build, we wanted to build something where you could be anyone you saw on Sword Art Online, except you know, not die in real life when you're playing them. Or, you know, one of these bite from Cowboy Bebop, you can or you know, whatever it is want to make a samurai, you want to make a Shinobi, you want to make a dude walk around a mech armour, you could do that. And it's there, and you got these different options for how you can go about it. So those are those kind of what we were looking at. And it's fun, because, you know, last year, there was actually a contest, we're making an anime RPG, which is really kind of what got us started on this. And it's, it's funny, because, you know, you had three months to write a role playing game as like, Alright, cool, we could do that. And most people wrote like, a 10,000 word game, because, you know, they're saying and not crazy. And we wrote 120,000 word game. And in the process of that, basically, we didn't have enough time to edit it, where we could actually get it submitted properly, because we you can't have things like errors in your starting equipment for a game that you submitted for it. So they didn't work out for that. But before we were done, we realised No, no, this is something we want to build. And we want to actually have this be a product that we're putting out there because it was fun. So you know, we have that and Mike you know, I talked about Mike and Mike and Nick have different animals that they love and they've gone into too and it was one of those cool things when we're sitting here talking about we're like I said, we're nerds we're you know if you if you want to come over here and you know out enemy knowledge me, you probably can, I'm not going to go and say I'm like an anime superfan. I just everything an anime that I got into I've loved because of how they approach their worlds and how they approach their characters. And the fact that they don't pull any punches, they just go for it. So for me when I look at a tabletop role playing game, that's exactly what you want. So it was just kind of looking at that thinking, alright, what do we really want to have on here and putting it all in there. So we made classes like the Butoh warrior, which is basically it's a z fighter, except if I call it z fighter from Dragonball Z. I'm going to get sued, probably rightfully so. So we don't call it that. But basically, if you want to have a z fight, or actually just watched the Mortal Kombat movie and realised, oh, wow, these are like fit right in there, too. So then I started thinking about how to do Mortal Kombat in lockdown. But that's neither here nor there. But yeah, we have that we have gunslingers if you wanted to do you know, bash, or if you want to do spike, if you want to actually go through and have that and The Gunslinger presence, investigator style class, it that private detective kind of thing for that nor feeling. And that's really kind of like the thought that we had for it. And then we also just have things like Summoners, and sorcerers and Samurai and Shinobi. And we have shapeshifters. And what you know, basically, it's almost any character that we've saw that was like, Okay, how can we go through and be able to play that, and then we started building it. And it's been fun, we've had a ball, and then it's like, Alright, what kind of world do we want to build. And that's been fun, too, because we want to really build a world in there and give people a setting to start with that's very much as that same anime feel, while at the same time, also, being very much what we do with our game systems and having a fit into that world and expanding our whole universe.
Snyders Return:I mean, I was having a look through the 180, page, off no download, please go to Kickstarter and download it. The artwork is phenomenal. It's a range of different styles, but all of them are beautifully drawn and presented.
Chance-NCM:Well, part of that part of that is because we can't, we're small company, you know, we're we're we've had a couple of products out, we do not have gigantic budgets, almost all of our budgets go straight to art as it is. And that's just how it is. That's how it works. And we ended up having to licence a lot of stock art and modify stock art to get it to fit our systems. Because we don't want to end up having to charge a tonne of money for all of our games, and we want to make sure we can get them out and make sure people can play. So that's part of the reason why you will see different styles, the larger budgets that we hit. And the higher goal we have, the more art we commissioned, we actually just got, by the way, our cover in four because we have two books locked down has two books, and one is the game masters guide that's going to show you how to run the game. It's gonna have all the monsters and the premade games and all that good stuff in the campaign. And it's also gonna have a tonne of lore and history that it's gonna be really fun to surprise your players with and drop it on them. So that's why we really want to have that separate book in this one. The other book is the player's guide. And Jason Gryphon, he goes by lunchbox, on Twitter and Social Media and stuff, he actually just finished our cover art for our for the players guy, which has me super excited because I'm loving the piece. So yeah, that's the whole thing in our it's such a cool thing too. I mean, it's, our goal is we can't wait to work it actually just have an artist that we're able to go through and commission every single piece that we want. Because, you know, it's such a cool thing when you have that unified feel in a book. And when we we can't always get a unified feel from having the same artists. So we really try to get everything dramatically, right and get everything on the right page. So it has the right feel for the stories that we're telling. So we do do that we put in a lot of work for that. And you know, that is part of the goal. You know, our goal is eventually to be able to do this full time and have this be a thing where what we do is we're game designers. And, you know, it's that the process is figuring out how to get for, you know, three buddies that were playing d&d and fate and all these other games for years, to getting to where everyone actually knows about our product and knows where our games are, and realises how much fun they are. So you know, they get I got some people that get upset with me because I compare my game to Dungeons and Dragons. On when I'm marketing. It's like, well, you have to because everyone knows Dungeons and Dragons. Yeah, almost nobody knows carbine jungle. And the thing is, we really think we built a better game, not that and when I say that I'm not insulting Dungeons and Dragons or insulting your players, just, you know, Dungeons and Dragons. Fifth Edition was everything we wanted, we wouldn't have built a game system we just would have played there's Yeah, we built one because we wanted more to our game and dungeons dragons is a very especially fifth edition is very streamlined system that has a good feeling to as a full feel to it. But it's very streamlined. And we wanted something that didn't just feel full, but was full and had more to it. So that's what we built our game system for. We built it for players and for tables that want more to their game and want more options to it. And that's what it is. And it's we really do think especially if you've been if you've been gaming for a while you're probably gonna really like this.
Snyders Return:Yeah, no, I wasn't a criticism about the the artwork at all, because the the various styles invoke different spark different bits of imagination and, and story arcs and things like that. So it was by no means a criticism, and apologies if it came across like that. But the world and again, having looked through the 180 pages, the mentions of the light war, the dark Ward and the the other sections in the pyramids, what was it like to construct this, this world and these iconic monuments within it?
Chance-NCM:Oh, it's fine. I mean, it just, you know, we love world building. I mean, that's a big part of, you know, for me, like I never played the first time I ever played a premade game was when I ran a lockdown one shot with rune landers for a podcast, because we're gonna be released probably in a couple of days now. But it's just, you know, that was the first time I ever ran a premade game. And I actually wrote that premade game. So I've never for us, we never went through and got like a supplement that said, Okay, here's the world to play in. Because we wanted to build our own worlds. So you know, when we went through, and when we made carbine jungle, that was a big part of how we would try to set up the universe for that setting was man we want to build, be able to build any world that we want in here. We want almost any world that you can think of, to be able to fit into this where you can play it and build it and have a lot of fun. So you can create whatever style universe you want. And with lockdown, it was just kind of one of those things like all right, well, you know what we're going to be we started thinking about the field that you have a lot of different animals, we started thinking about our safe fantasy system. So what can you do when you have magic and technology and all this stuff? Just kind of, they're in the same world and we start seeing Okay, what kind of stories can we tell what kind of stories do we want to tell? And how can we fit that in so that's just going through and take our you know, this will be good, this will be fun. This was as I like it, like I said, we're all nerds and I can't remember it was Nick or Mike Williams. I know tidally locked planets and it was doing he was reading up on on astronomy and we found tidally locked planets that don't actually have there's no there's no rotation to them, you know, they're just they stay without, like our moon, our moon is tidally locked. Same sides always facing the sun. And with that whole idea is like, well, let's just do our whole world like that. So you have what would it be like on that world and all of a sudden those like, Alright, well, you're gonna have one side that's completely scorched all the time. You have one side that's completely frozen all the time and you're not that part in the middle? Well, that's where they would have to live. So if you're going to have to live on this world, you're gonna have to figure out a way to survive on that strip and what could you do about that? And then it was like, Alright, well then like Alright, so we were To have a group that a crash landed there, what's what's going to happen to them, we start thinking about all the different hardships and struggles and all the different stuff that could happen there. And then starting our head, let's go through and what can we build and that stuff for us. That's why we do this, you know, being able to create our own worlds and universes that that's, that's the best part of game design of playing tabletop role playing games, all that. Or just also, you know, seeing what happens, your players get there as like, oh, and then when they hit those moments, so we really just tried to go through and build the world where we can run those games that we want, have those great moments and keep going with it. And it was just, it was a lot of fun.
Snyders Return:It sounds like it was a lot of fun. And sort of building on that there's sort of tears of play to allow a different gaming experience and progression. Would you mind sort of just touching on that, please?
Chance-NCM:Sure. A big part of like, try forge Union for our game engine is a big part of that is how we do advancement. And how you advance your characters is basically, we really didn't like the fact that I'm going to fifth edition here, just because it's fifth edition, by the way, like I don't criticise it, it is the most popular game system that has ever existed. It is actually a fun game system though. I'm in a podcast right now, where I play fifth edition, I enjoy fifth edition. I just, it's it's very streamlined. But you could make a fifth edition character if it's not a caster, and make about 25 choices. And that's all you make for your entire advancement through your whole character. And for us that just felt incredibly stifling. And, you know, in almost any game system, it's kind of limited with how you advance so we really went through decide, okay, how can we make this as open as humanly possible without the game completely falling off the rails. And we came up with our advancement system where we use a tiered system. And basically how you advance our system is every session, you get one point, or every time you if you finish a session and complete a mission, you get two points. So it's always one or two points every session. And you get to spend those points on something, some way to increase your character. Part of the reason we do it over sessions over like experience points is because we're not going to tell you what's valuable in your session. If crushing monsters is valuable for your session, that's awesome. Get your advancement point, if you guys hang out in the bar the entire time, and just being absolutely ridiculous, there is what you guys are doing doing your session. That's your advanced point, I'm not going to tell you how to value time, know how you guys want to play your game it again, like I said, once it leaves, what you got our book, it's not our game anymore, it's yours. So how you want to spend your sessions, that's how you're advancing your characters, you know, go for it. So you guys get to decide that however you want, by the way, we, if you do like crushing monsters, we did set up rules for experience to, you know, it's like we were not going to tell you how to play we put in rules in there for people that specifically want experience. Because if you want to use it, you know, by all means, just it's your game. So that's how the system works. And we use a tear system, because realise, well, if we just give them points that could spin on anything, it went completely bonkers super fast, you know, it just, we need to have some rails on it. So we said a tier system, we're short of structures, how many points you could have before you start increasing more in specific areas. So that's basically it was we have a six tier system as designed to keep as little rails as possible on what you do with your character while keeping the progression where it makes sense. And the game is able to follow a little bit of a course without going completely nuts. So and it works pretty well, too. That's, we tried several different things before we kind of settled on this. And when we hit this and when you started going with it, start playing with it realise, alright, this is going to work. But you really can make almost any character you want. Like, you have billions of options. And that's not even a joke, you have billions of character combinations you can make with your system with our systems. So it's it's pretty wide open at the same time. By the way, if that sounds overwhelming, we also set up advancement paths that you can do where it's like, okay, I don't want to have to think about all this, you can just pick it advancement path, and I'll take you all the way through the whole game. So if you just want to do it, where if you want to have ultimate customization do so if you just want to have a path that's kind of laid out for you, that's gonna give you a really cool character, you can do that too. Both of them are set up where you could go either way. Or if you want to start off with that whole, I want to follow the easy path starting off. And then when you get a better feel for it, I want to go back and kind of tweak my character do so go retcon it, go back and get that character How would be if you were advancing it all the way through by you know, with what you knew that we fully support that. So however your table wants to go about it, do it. But the whole idea is you get to make your character however you want to do it and it's very wide open with the choices that you can make.
Snyders Return:Yeah, absolutely. And sounds really flexible and sticking with the theme of progression and moving up the ladder in the chain and the tiers and things. And flipping over to the Kickstarter side, have you got stretch goals and pledge bonuses and all that sort of good stuff in place and what have people got to look forward to? When not if when they go on back lockdown on Kickstarter?
Chance-NCM:Well, if you go on back lockdown, we got a lot of different options. I mean, it just like if you want to pick up a couple if you want to go get digital $25 gives you digital copies of both the player's guide and the gms guide. So $25 gets you all the content, and there you go. And then we have options though for getting hardbacks. Or you could also get hardback for $45, you can get black and white paperbacks for both copies of both versions for 45 or $45. Also, we have versions where you can get hardbacks of both books, the players guide and the gems guide. One of our favourite things that we do, and we've done this on every Kickstarter, and we love this, is we actually let you guys add your own NPCs to the canon of the story if you like. So we have an option where you could back us and I believe it's called. There's two different tiers. There's a shapeshifter. And I can't remember the second one, the shapeshifter is the normal one where basically, you pick the shapeshifter package, you get all the digital digital copies. And then you get to design an NPC and we'll work with you on your archetype and your personality. The society or group comes from the species, every character and all that. So you go through and you figure out exactly what you want your character to be their backstory and all that. And then they become a part of the canon of the game, we have a section on our books called the Rogues Gallery. And in the Rogues Gallery is just a bunch of NPCs. And only that we're going to be writing a campaign that's part of this book that's going to come with the GM guide. And your NPC will be a part of that campaign. So your NPC will be somewhere in there. So if you just want to make a bartender you can, if you want to make a dungeon diving Explorer, you can you can make your NPC however you want to make it and they're going to be in that book and they will forever be a part of lockdowns cannon, and anyone that picks up lockdown is gonna be able to use your NPC as part of their games. Wow. And yeah, I mean, occasionally, like, one of the first guys is a buddy on Twitter, too. Named name's Charlie, but he was one of the first guys that back does. And he helped come up with an idea for an NPC. And then after we talked about his NPC that actually ended up becoming kind of a big part of the universe's lore too, because like, Oh, this is really cool. Well, what if we did this? What if he did this, and then we end up adding like this whole section to carbine jungle, because it was fun. And, you know, sometimes that stuff happens too. But, you know, I'm not saying we're gonna, the entire world's gonna be built around your character. But if you have an NPC in there, it will be part of it. Every play, every person never plays, lockdown will have your character there and be able to use it. And you know, if you can take a look at carbine jungle, and you can see the NPCs that are in there, we put in a fair amount of time do it. Also, when we did our mission decks, we did the same thing. So we have, I think it was five NPCs per deck. And by the way, if you don't know what mission decks are, they're on Drive Thru RPG, they're very cool. They're they're dungeons that you can run with or without a DM, or GM because we have it for ffiv or for carbine jungle. And you basically go through and they have a whole quest and actually have three quests per deck that you can go through and do with monsters and traps and treasure and all that stuff. And boss fights. So but then there's also five NPCs per deck that could randomly show up and help the party or hurt the party depending on the NPCs mood that we're on. Most of them were actually designed by people who backed on Kickstarter. So we really love this we like getting people involved with the game we like people getting into the game and literally now you get to get into the game if you want so that's a shapeshifter package there is also a another package that has that where you could get it that also comes with hard copies of both of the books if you really want hard copies By the way, I'm pulling up the Kickstarter right now so that way I could look it up because bugging me that I can't remember which package it was. It was the Butoh warrior books and NPC package. So the Butoh warrior books and MPC package 120 bucks, but that gives you hardback copies of the game masters guide and players guide and it gets you your own MPC. On top of that, by the way, a couple of the other big packages that we have that aren't just books. If you've ever wanted to write your own one shot if you ever want to get something out there published like on Drive Thru RPG or something like that. The Shinobi one shot is we'll work with you on kind of making your idea for a one shot reality. So if you've ever wanted to have that happen, where you have someone that could help you out with kind of putting it together and all that stuff, and you ever had an idea, we'll work with you on that. So that's actually a$200 package that you can pick up called the Shinobi. One shot. And if you want us to go through and run a game for you, we'll do that too. So that's our other really big package is $300. And I realise, for most people $300 is not so I'm not, I'm not asking, I'm not expecting you guys to go out there and spend 300 bucks $25 get you digital copies of both games, super stoked if you go and pick up a game because we want to play in our games. But if you actually want to game with me, or Mike or Nick and the for the noragami, those team will run a session for your table. So we'll actually go through, we'll either do a one shot and help you guys get all of your characters created and all that stuff. While we're kind of sitting there with it. Or if you already got your characters, we'll run you through your first session, where you guys get to go through and try out your characters work together as a party, and we'll run that game for you. So those are some of the different options that we have. But you know, we'll help you write a one shot, we'll play a one shot with you, you can make your own nbcs, enjoying the games, or just pick up the books and have fun. We're very happy with all these but we want you guys playing our game.
Snyders Return:Absolutely. So someone has to download the 180 page introduction is there. Like a missional example playthrough in there that people could sort of learn the system with
Chance-NCM:yes, we do have one thing we don't have in there a premade characters, which kind of it's one of the things I if I had to do over again, I would have put that into our free system, which means the next expansion that we're next thing that we released, we're gonna have pre made characters in there because it was looking back, it would have been better, but you know, live and learn. So we don't have pre made characters, you got to make your own characters. But there is a little mini campaign in the back. And it's just, it's probably three or four sessions worth of materials, you could probably rush through it if you just kind of flew through it real fast and just smashed everything and like a session or two. But yeah, there is a premade game, there's a premade game that's in the back of it. That's just a little bit of fun. What we're gonna be doing for the campaign is obviously going to be a whole lot more than that. But there is something in there that you can try out that's already got the encounters and the maps and all that stuff built together for you.
Snyders Return:All right, well, yeah, definitely. Something for people to pick up and play through. And character creation is always fun, regardless of the system. So that's that should draw. Some people definitely draw some people in. And you mentioned their future expansions and things. What is the future for norcom ethos moving forward, you've got locked down Kickstarter that's going to be closing or finishing. Soon after this podcast comes out, and then on May
Chance-NCM:11, it's going through May 11. And backing as back as sooner instead of later, please. The sooner the better. But yeah, after locked down, that we're always working on stuff like right now where we are planned next expansion is probably going to be heroes, liars, thieves, and fools, which is a cyberpunk nor style setting. One of things by the way, we put in all of our our games as we have rules subsets for different styles of games you might want to play and we've always we put in rules for nor if you want more investigative style game, we set up rules that could kind of enhance that style of play. Or if you want space warfare, we set it up where it's more of an objective based where you have a Strikeforce that's going through and accomplishing these goals and missions, we kind of set it up away with that and ranking systems. We set up rules for cosmic horror, which has psychic dismemberment, which is one of my favourite things that we've ever came up with. Because you basically gain psychic powers as your mind gets torn apart and you go completely crazy. It's awesome. The hero's liar season fools is an expansion that we're looking at doing that really focuses on on that kind of nor investigative style. It's a very urban game, for the most part. So it's going to be part of the metropolis Republic, the the main, the main city, that is the kind of the centre of the carbine jungle universe, it's going to take place there. So it's a very urban centred game, which is should be fun. So that's probably our next expansion. Whether it will be or not, I'm not certain. Because we're also working on a fantasy version using a fantasy setting that uses our game engine. So it's just a straight fantasy version still has all the cool rules and stuff from carbine jungle, just as a fantasy setting. And we're also working on a urban fantasy setting that we're working on to so for just like modern day, and there, we're kind of looking at a Victorian steampunk thing that we might be doing, but we're not sure if that's going to happen or not. And we're looking at doing a ffiv version of IV port of carbine jungle also, because like I said, it's a fun game, and people like it. So we really like our mythology and everything else. I think you really like our setting and our classes and everything. So we're looking at doing a 5g version of that we might be doing a 5g version of lockdown to probably afterwards so I don't know what's next. But we're still making stuff and we're loving making stuff so we're gonna keep doing it so that's kind of what we're looking at I believe it'll be heroes liars season fools and might be the five year it's either heroes liars, thieves and fools or the fivey Porter carbine jungle is probably our next thing that's coming out. And if it's not that then it's because something else really hooked does and we just kind of dove into that one and went crazy on it like, because heroes later season fools was actually supposed to be our first expansion. And we kind of fell in love lockdown was we're building it, everything else realised. Now let's let's get this out. Let's get this together first. And so yeah, I think I know what's next. But I really don't, but it's going to be something fun and it's going to be something tabletop and you're going to enjoy it. And that's really what at least we believe you're going to enjoy it. I won't sound too arrogant, but I really do think we've made a good game system. And we I think the setting is a whole lot of fun. And you guys are really gonna enjoy lockdown
Snyders Return:today. Absolutely. I'm, as I say looking through the book and the artwork is it's so as you mentioned, modular and flexible and capable of handling so many different variations on styles of play with shown in is mentioned the shown in anime style, and Mecca and another sewed at such a variety available.
Chance-NCM:Yeah, we we set up rules. Specifically, if you wanted to have a shown in style, I mean, part of a lot of what we have is sort of shown in but if you really want to focus in on the aspect of schoenen that deals with younger people being involved with huge adventure and things along those lines, we really want to make sure like if that's what you want to focus on, this is kind of a way to approach it. So we built in a rub rule subset that you can kind of tack on to the game if you want to do that. Also, if you want to have a mecca style game, we have a rule subset for attacking on a mecha style game, we're also probably going to be adding on a kaiju style game. And then we're going to really go through and so what would it be like in a kaiju game, and one person as well is going to be playing as kaiju saying, Well, now we're thinking about how to get where you playing as kite, but we're more thinking about how to survive it and everything else. But if we can figure out by the way, how to do it, while you're, you know, playing as kaiju we'll do that too. But that one's gonna be a little bit tricky. But um, and then also, by the way, once we have the surviving the kaiju game, and then the mecha style game, then we could have the mecha verse kaiju, because well, yeah, you obviously want to have mecha, verse kaiju, if they're there, right? I mean, why wouldn't you do this? This should? Right? Yeah, that's how I felt about it. We're probably going to be going in and adding on Pokemon, for lack of a better term subset of rules. Because why not, and it'd be fun. And you know, and that's the whole thing, if you don't want to play the Pokemon sub set of rules, you just don't you did any sub set of rules you don't want to bother with, you just don't use and that's okay, those are all set up as optional things. But if you do want to go through and capture a whole bunch of monsters on the plant, and train them up and go to tournaments and stuff like that, why not? So we're going to kind of build in a subset of rules where people that want to play that style of game are gonna have the option to, and we really want to make this whatever game you want it to be. We want you to be able to play it.
Snyders Return:Yeah, absolutely. I was so much going on. And all these great products, great ideas, this this crucible, almost of ideas and inspirations that you're going to put out for us to play with. What is it you do for this might be a little bit personal, but what is it you do as a break? Where's your downtime from work? I won't call game design work, because I can tell how much you love it. But from the passion that is,
Chance-NCM:well, this is my, my downtime. So you know, I mean, it's right now, I mean, I I'm a teacher, like when I when I'm not doing game design, I'm a teacher, between me, Mike and Nick, we have nine children between us, with our families, and I personally am raising two children that have autism. So that's a big chunk of my time. And effort is going towards that. And it's awesome. I mean, I love it. It's hard. I don't want to give a wrong impression. My daughter Wendy is high functioning. My son Luke is nonverbal. He's five years old and doesn't speak. So there's a whole lot of stress and a whole lot of work that goes towards that. But it's also just a lot of joy. And it's the same thing with carbine jungle and the game design stuff. It's a lot of work, but it's also a lot of joy. So you kind of asked like, you know, what's our downtime, I don't know what downtime I have. But it's kind of a combination of a lot of these things that are a bunch of work but that I also love and then just you know spending time with family and stuff like that. And you know, for Mike and Nick and all it's the same way there. We do this because we love it and we enjoy it and we also spend time for all of us. His family is such an important thing. So that's kind of where we go when we're not doing this. So I'm not sure if that's accurate enough answer all around. But that's sort of my downtime.
Snyders Return:That's a wonderful answer. It's a wonderful answer. But there's no wrong answer to a question like that. It was just a an insight into to where you managed to find a moment for yourself if you can, and by the sounds of it, those moments are few and fleeting.
Chance-NCM:Yeah, well, like I said, that a lot of ways this is these are my moments, you know, the game design, the stuff like that, it really is one of those things that we love to do. And, you know, we have business meetings every week. And Nick kind of got mad at me for kind of outing this. But when we have a business, Mike lives in Indiana, which is a couple 1000 miles out. And me and Nick are both in this live in the Rye right around our hometown. So we're pretty close. But now we've had, you know, the COVID virus for the last year. So none of that even matters, because we you know, me and Nick, we live maybe 10 miles from each other. And I think I've seen him three times in the last year. So, you know, it's just it's one of those things where we don't drive over and visit because I'm a school teacher and his wife's a nurse. So then it's like, well, what are you gonna do? You know, it's trying to be safe, and all that. But, um, we'll have phone meetings or business meetings. But when we do, it's three friends who are all gaming nerds talking gaming stuff, and we're laughing for the entire time and loving it. And even when we have stressful meetings, we're still talking about stuff that we love and we are passionate about. So even even when it's rough and frustrating. I mean, I've been stressing out I'll tell you right now, what's this Kickstarter started, I stressed the entire time. I'm not very good at letting go of stuff like that. So I've always constantly thinking about as I'm checking my checking the Kickstarter every 15 minutes to see if it's changed. When you have a Kickstarter that's probably gonna have maybe 100 backers or so it doesn't change a lot in a month, every 15 minutes. So you know, it's, but even with the stressful parts and stuff like that, this is all stuff that we love doing. And it's what we do for fun. So you know, even when it is work, it's still fun. That's, that's
Snyders Return:fair enough. You mentioned it there. And it seems like a good moment to remind everybody would you like to remind everybody where they can find naukowe mythos and your products in Kickstarter, please
Chance-NCM:NorCal mitos calm or at norm Academy those on Twitter, you can find us, we're around, always up to tabletop shenanigans. If you look for lockdown ttrpg on Kickstarter, lockdown has no CNN, it's locais, d o w n. And you can find our Kickstarter on Kickstarter. And take a look. There's a lot of cool options on there, there's a free download. So you can really check out the game and see if it's something that you might be interested in. And, you know, that's kind of a starter for what we're, that's the free version, or what we're going to be releasing in the end is probably gonna be about twice as much content or so. But we really do think you're going to like this game. So locked down ttrpg on Kickstarter, or just look for us on Twitter. And you'll find all the links there.
Snyders Return:Again, I'll make sure the links are in the description below. You did mention earlier in the podcast, if you want to shout them out, I can always put
Chance-NCM:reminders, by the way, cast runes on Twitter, but rune landers you can find them on Spotify, pod bean all over the place. great bunch of people, awesome people a whole lot of fun. They have a few a couple different shows that they're doing. I'm in the one called tall water tales, I play garnock, cantankerous artificer dwarf, and outside of garnock, you also have a whole lot of great people there. They also have their rapscallion show. And a couple of offshoots of rapscallions, which are just really fun shows and then their rapscallions is on their third season. toller tells we're on our first season, and just really good people good shows fun gaming. It's also a curated podcast. And if you don't know, curated podcast basically means the recording the edit out while the arms and the assignment pauses and everything else, just so you get a little bit cleaner sound. And it's a whole lot of fun. I started off as a listener, and I was talking to Matt Adam, who's the game master on the series on Twitter, just really good guy. And from there, kind of hit it off a little bit. Now I'm part of the cast and having a whole lot of fun.
Snyders Return:Nice, nice again, I will put that link in the description below since you're involved with that and please, please go and check them out. We've covered a lot of topics and and a lot of information and lockdown sounds exciting and I love the influences that you sort of bring in and have used to create it. Is there anything that we haven't discussed as yet that you would like to mention in this interview before we finish?
Chance-NCM:I don't know I'm actually considering considering we're crossing an ocean right now in this interview, something that I probably should mention. on lockdown. I don't have every single country listed for For like that will ship to all the different countries, but we will. So shoot us a message if you're interested in backing lockdown, and we do not have your country listed, shoot us a message, we will get the shipping cost set up. The problem is, we don't know. Basically, I can either list you the most expensive prices on Kickstarters shipping, or I can come up with 118 different countries Rice's. They don't want to do either of those things. So we just listed out a few of the ones that we often get, we got orders from, if you're from a different country, and you want to get a physical product for Kickstarter, we're not shipping there to shoot us a message, I'll look up all the shipping costs for what it will be to ship the books to wherever you're at. And we'll go anywhere. So yeah, we don't want a feeling you want to feel left out or like we're not doing that just we kind of focused on the ones that we have got orders from before because I really don't want to look up shipping costs 418 countries? I don't unless it's like oh, yeah, it's gonna be $70 for shipping for these two books, because that's kind of what we would have to do to cover all the different countries with one thing, and that just sounded terrible to me. So I wanted to go through and make sure we could go through and take care of people individually as they came up.
Snyders Return:That's very fair. Jazz. It's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. And I I'd love to have either yourself or one of the NorCal mythos team back on the show for an interview in the future.
Chance-NCM:Oh, that'd be great. Definitely sounds like fun.
Snyders Return:So until we speak again, thank you very much for joining me. Thank you for listening. If you'd like to learn more about the show, then go to WWW dot Snyder's return.squarespace.com. Alternatively, you can find us over on Twitter. At Return Snyder, you have a link tree link in the description of this episode. And if you want to support us, come and join us over on Patreon and we also have a Discord server. Please leave us a review because we'd love to learn how to improve the channel and provide better content out for for those who are listening until we until we speak again. Thank you